There's Something About Meatballs, and A Sweet New Year!

Wow. So I just looked at this blog and realized it has descended into a PR arm for the book and there is NO FOOD on the first page!!! That is Very Bad, and this will correct it.

Greetings from Seattle-- a lovely town full of delicious food. BUT... you know, after eating out for 6 days straight now I gotta say, I just want some home cooked goodness, you know? Last night at our singing at Third Place Books Hostess with the Mostess Wendy Manning arranged for a staff member (ROCK STAR) to make food from the cookbook for the signing. I thought I was going to dissolve into a puddle of tears when I smelled the Overnight Chuck Roast, Rice Pilaf with Garlic Yogurt and Potato Salad!!!! Delicious.

And speaking of delicious, this post has been sitting around waiting to be written for about a month! Shame! Italian Meatball dinner on Rosh Hashanah weekend. Brilliant! And the tomatoes, chard and herbs??? From MY GARDEN!!!!! Below, the invite.
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Hello again, hungry kiddies!

Maybe I flatter myself, but I want to get a few more of these in before I go away on Book Tour! The Musical! (see: Jazz Hands.) Seriously, the publicity machine for Forking Fantastic! Put The Party Back In Dinner Party (by yours truly and Zora) is really ramping up and before you know it, we will be drinking endless martinis on jet planes, arriving in baggage claims sloppily calling for our "handlers", trashing hotel rooms, removing our clothes at book signings, and auctioning my signed brassiere off for cab fare back to the trashed hotel room.
So in light of what MY future holds, and how much I know you will miss me, I thought we would partake in a good old fashioned red checked tablecloth dinner this Saturday night. Karl and I recently had dinner at a much revered place here in Astoria called Trattoria L'Incontro. I had Ossobucco over gnocchi, he had meatballs and spaghetti. As good as the ossobucco was, it couldn't hold a candle to those meatballs; they were ridiculously delicious-- tasted like someone's mom had made them. Then just last weekend I had the fine pleasure of being with Scarola at her little Fire Island hideaway and Sunday night she made her "Sunday Sauce" as Nick (another real Italian) called it. I carefully watched her marinara and definitely learned something so I could foist it upon you. Here is what I am thinking:

Chicken Liver Crostini (in my lifelong goal for mine to be as good as Michael White's, I try again)***
Mussels and Clams with Preserved Lemon, Wine, Garlic and Chili Flake (and Crusty Bread!)
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Herb Salad from my garden!!
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Pasta with Meatballs and Marinara
Broccoli Raab
Tomato Salad with Red Onion, Capers and Anchovy Vinaigrette
Chard and Cauliflower with Sherry Soaked Raisins and Toasted Pine Nuts
Garlic Bread!!!!
Some sort of desserty thing. (honestly, after those little fried peach pie things from last week's dinner, I am still in dessert coma)
Usual Rules Apply. First 20 rsvps get the seats, $35 + a bottle of wine gets you in the door. No cancellations after Friday at 5pm, I gotta make some meatballs! Address with confirmation.



This was the "fun" side of the table. They were so self entertaining, I didn't even need to get over there! God-- does my backyard ever look more beautiful than this? I think not.


Cauliflower-- roasted with olive oil, then tossed with Chard (from my garden!!) that I sauteed with garlic, sherry soaked raisins and chili flake. Very southern Italian and fucking good!


Tomatoes-- mostly from my garden, with red onion, capers, and a vinaigrette made of rice vinegar (very soft acidity) a touch of sherry vinegar, garlic, salt,pepper, olive oil and ANCHOVIES. Tons of em mashed up. Sooooooo good. I could eat this all day long.

Clams and mussels with smoked paprika, white wine and garlic. An old friend-- sort of standby that never disappoints. Sort of like that special booty call person in your life.


Oh Michael White... I will discover your chicken liver pate secrets YET!!! This time, I sauteed them in butter and sherry, and then did a redux with port and sherry and added a little sugar, a little vin santo and tons more butter. I think next time I add marsala.


More tomato porn...



Toasted pine nuts-- these were supposed to go on the cauliflower.. and then I forgot. So I think we just ate them. They would have been great on the cauli/chard, though too.

Oh you unphotogenic little anchovies.... I know how beautiful and special you are!!!



Karl, my loving husband, documents my debut as a farmer. I grew all of that, yo!


Oh...my Austrian ancestors would be so proud... If only I could roll proper pastry too!


Golden raisins, soaking in warm sherry. Yeah.

Roasted cauli, waiting to be united with sauteed chard


Meatballs!!! Veal, pork and beef meatballs. Combined with a paste of garlic, red onion, herbs, bread crumbs, eggs, and olive oil. Sooooo moist and delicious and full of flavor.
Ohhhhh broccoli raab, you bitter bitter mistress, you. How I love thee.


Test meatballs.

Meatballs in the raw. Hot.

Another lovely and successful evening. I have no recollection of dessert-- oh wait-- i do too. It was apples baked with cinnamon and butter, finished with bourbon whipped cream. You know, in honor of Rosh Hashanah. Thanks to all, and to all a good night!

Book Tour! The Musical! Video Links below of EARLY AM TEEVEE!!

Ok, so it's not really a musical. But it does involve going from city to city, checking into fancy hotels, driving rental cars very fast through unfamilar streets, consulting the iphone a lot for directions, calling friends who are from whatever city we are in to find out where to eat, signing copies of Forking Fantastic! in bookstores and "liberating" them from their bad placement in the store, and getting up REALLY early to do local teevee segments. Here is Portland and Here is Seattle. Notice what quick studies we are and how much better we get after PDX! I LOOOOOOOVE book tour! I was MADE to go on book tour!!!

Tonight we are on to Third Place Books in Seattle (7-8pm)-- run by the lovely and amazing Wendy Manning. (I know that because she has had dinner in my home a few times and I am sooooo looking forward to seeing her again!) Tomorrow we are at Dahlia Bakery in Seattle.It is lovely here, what with Salumi, Anchovies and Olives and Maximus-Minimus, (which we just call "The Pig Bus").

Off I go to freshen up for the clamoring masses at the book signing....

Forking Fantastic Debutante Day Is Here!

Holy Shit.

I know that I shopped a teevee cooking show, got rejected all over town as "too edgy", "Not Rachel Ray enough" and "not like our current lineup", got depressed, wondered what was next and then *bing*! said, "well, let's just write a book and then they'll have to give us a teevee show, right? Isn't that how it works?

That was almost 3 years ago. Today, through a series of minor and major miracles, a lot of Dallas (10 seasons!) endless reruns of Law and Order SVU, Mahler Symphonies, Shostakovich, Bruckner, Brahms, lots of Bach chorales and fugues, Monteverdi, a gorgeous roots box set called Goodbye Babylon, tons of SND for friends and strangers, lots and lots of recipe testing, encouragement from so many, unconditional love from my husband and friends, and lots of vision and support from our team at Penguin, Forking Fantastic! Put The Party Back In Dinner Party is HERE!!!!

I can hardly believe it. Everything else I have created has been temporary-- music, theatre, food... here in the moment and then forever a memory. There is a beauty in that. But now I have a book that you can hold, and touch. It is amazing and exciting and thrilling and scary and.......Zora and I did it.

Perhaps a few people will be converted to home cooking and dinner parties for friends and strangers. That would feel like great success.

FF Website! And..... gasp! Twitter!

I swear to God I will go back to posting reports about dinner... I am sitting on 3 posts right now. But how can I talk about that when it is Sooooooo exciting that we just got the website live yesterday???????

It is HERE.

And... Twitter. I, who sat in a marketing meeting at Penguin books and told them all that I was "Too old, fat and tired to twitter".. is now doing it. I don't feel as compromised as I thought I would, but I still think that I can't possibly have that much to say.

Tune in and see, i suppose. And Forking Fantastic is Here.

Forking Fantastic gets lovin from a COMPLETE STRANGER!!!

Her name was Rosie, she was a showgirl..... wait. wrong song.

We have never met her, and yet she loooved the book! She is not related to us, not have we ever got her drunk! (and yet...we feel we owe it to her to get her drunk!)

See her review here.

It's coming, people, buy your copies now and it will all count towards our first week numbers. Remember-- the more books we sell, the greater chance we will make money, and the sooner we can pick up the bar tab for you.

World domination. One dinner party and one drink at a time.

Forking Fantastic! The Flipbook Edition

This is here so we can backdoor it to my author page on Amazon. Enjoy! And buy the book; Only $13.60 on presale! (I have paid more than that for a cocktail for Chrissakes...)

Tamara and Zora on Channel 4 in the U.K. TONIGHT!

Remember waaaaaaaay back, last November when Jamie Oliver came to dinner? We did a special dinner for a documentary he was shooting about food in the U.S. called Jamie's American Road Trip.

Well, The Sunday Night Dinner In Astoria is featured in tonight's New York episode. We haven't seen it yet, but the ad for it was so hilarious that it got yanked from YouTube (actually, I suspect there was some licensing issue, what with his being dressed like all of the Village People and using the song "Go West...") but you can still see him dancing in assless chaps here.

I have total faith that the show's going to rock.

Today, Tuesday, Sept. 14th, 2009 at 5 pm EST you can log on here and participate in a live forum with us. It will take place after the show runs in the U.K. at 9 pm Greenwich Mean Time (4 pm here.) There is also a Q & A that we did on the same website. Maybe you will learn something new about Sunday Night Dinner!

Don't worry, should it ever be aired in the US, we will be sure to tell you. But truthfully, given the amount of cussing aired in the L.A. episode, and given the amount I remember doing during filming, I somehow doubt it will ever see the uncensored light of day outside of my living room, here...

Dear Sir/Madam: We Regret To Inform You That... You Have Crabs.

Oh Crabs.

I love Crabs. But, no one loves Baltimore Crabs more than Zora's husband Peter, so no crab dinner is complete without him.

This dinner had the smell of fear and sweat before it even got started. My initial intention was to travel out to The Hunts' Point Fish Market in the middle of the night to purchase two bushels of crabs. Then, the reality of keeping two baskets of live crabs cold for fifteen hours hit, and I realized I needed a new plan.

You can't cook a dead crab, you see. They need to be alive and kicking, as the song goes.

New plan: Call Vishnu the Fish Man and have him call his purveyor at Hunt's Point, and get the crabs from him, so to speak.

I was specific. I asked for two bushels of #1 'Jimmies.' Jumbo Jimmies, if you will. 'Jimmies' are male crabs; Bigger, and by this late in the season, nice and heavy in their shells. MUCH easier to pick than the smaller female crabs. Vishnu says, 'no problem,' and that he will have them for me when I get there on Friday afternoon.

I arrive to pick them up Friday and it is cold and raining out. Great.

So it turns out that (a) I COULD have gone to Hunters' Point myself and just kept the crab bushels in the backyard under ice for the day and they probably would have been fine (although I would be exhausted, since Hunts Point is only open in the wee hours of the morning) and, (b) as it's raining, it is looking increasingly as though we will have to have the dinner inside, which is fine if one lives in a church basement, but less so when you are trying to feed twenty people armed with crab hammers in your living room. (Cut to: visual of crab parts all over the ceiling.)

I inspect one of the bushels, and there are some big crabs on top. Totally trying to jump out of the container. One of them makes it to the floor, and we wind up chasing him down the meat aisle. Great crabs so far. I pay for them, Vishnu helps me get a cab, (which we have to then line with black garbage bags as the bushels are already beginning to stink) and the crabs and I are off to my house. The crabs get unloaded and are moved to the back yard, and I go back upstairs to the kitchen where I resume the rest of the prep.

I saute some slab bacon and vidalia onions and simmer, with ham hocks, collards, escarole, chicory, water, salt and a little cider vinegar for about 2 hours.


I boil the little salt potatoes with so much salt they float, drain them and set them aside.

I whisk up sugar, salt, and white vinegar until it is tart and sweet. I slice cucumbers and vidalia onions very, very thinly and then toss them all together and park them in the fridge to marinate.

I melt butter, add flour to make a roux, then add half and half, heavy cream and cheese, and then toss in cooked macaroni. I never made macaroni and cheese that didn't come in a box before today (to my credit--- the last time I made mac and cheese at all was in college) so I have to call Karl over to see if I am doing it right. I toast bread crumbs with butter and Parmesan, scatter over the top and bake the whole business. Many hours later, people cannot get enough of my first go at macaroni and cheese. So, there!

Myam!

Zora and Peter arrive when it is almost time to start cooking crabs. We realize that I have once again over-committed my burners and we will have to do the corn in the oven. Can you do corn in the oven? Zora shucks the ears and arranges them in water in roasting pans and covers tightly with foil. They go on 450 degrees for about 10 minutes and came out perfectly. Who knew?



There is a last-minute bit of head-scratching over the location of the crab recipe." RECIPE? What recipe? I thought we just layered them in with a little water and vinegar and then rock salt and Old Bay-- steam for about 15 minutes..."

No, No. Apparently there exists a recipe that we used the last time we did crabs (see, you cook enough of these damn dinners and you can't remember anything. I am beginning to have a little compassion for poor Alfred Portale!)


So, while Zora slices tomatoes, Peter does some research on The Internets (it's a series of tubes) and finds the recipe. The water and vinegar are measured, the first of the crabs are dropped into boiling Old Bay graves.



Excellent.



Except, we discover that, after the first layer of very alive, perfectly acceptable crabs, there are many, many layers of smaller, #2 crabs. NOT #1's as I had ordered. And the second bushel aren't even #2's... those are #3s.

NO ONE wants to pick #3 crabs unless they are wearing a hair net and working in a cannery. Fuckity fuck. And it is not like I can take them back. We forge ahead. People have to work twice as hard for a little bit of crab meat. Delicious crab, but getting to it is a major pain in the ass.

Oh, and also, the crabs are all females. All of them.

Now, Vishnu has been my trusty seafood guy for the past three years; He is solid. But his purveyor LIED to him and the following day, I let him have it about how he needs to tell his guy how unhappy I was. He got screwed with no lube and no love. Poor Vishnu. Great guy, but he fell for the old crab bait and switch.

Thanks to Hani for the cool pic!

Wrong crabs, but delicious, nonetheless! Everyone cracks and eats crabs until their fingers have tiny little cuts on them and the Old Bay is getting into the cuts and burning. OW! Yum! OW!





We put all the sides out, along with a big bowl of melted butter for people to coat the ears of corn.

The Dairy Maid!

Then the banana bourbon pudding, one of Karl's masterpiece dishes, rolls out.

Thanks again, Hani!

Cut to: Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, as some people who shall remain nameless (Fertig) run naked throughout the forest, covered in bananas and boozy pudding...

All in all, a very successful evening.

No crabs on the ceiling. Karl, Peter and Zora stay up late into the night picking the meat out of the remaining half-bushel of crabs out on the back balcony while I sneak off to bed... Anticipation got me up at 6 am and by 2 am I can no longer see straight.

And the coda? The coda is that this was a Friday night dinner, and sadly, our trash goes out on TUESDAY. Let me just say that the other, bigger lesson learned here is: DO NOT schedule a crab dinner for twenty people four days before your trash gets picked up. MY GOD. The stink. The stink was perceptible from a BLOCK AWAY. For three days. It was horrible. We had to close the front windows, and our neighbors wanted to run us off the block and rightly so. Even the contractor strength black garbage bags couldn't contain the crabby stench.

Live and learn. With crabs!